Sometime this month, Alex Rodriguez is likely to get his three-thousandth hit, becoming the twenty-ninth player in major-league history, and only the second Yankee, to reach the milestone. Whether it happens at Camden Yards, in Baltimore, Marlins Park, in Miami, or at home, at Yankee Stadium, Seth Hawkins will be there. Hawkins has been there for each of the last twenty batters who have joined the three-thousand-hit club, from Hank Aaron in 1970 to Derek Jeter four summers ago.
Hawkins, who is seventy-two, grew up in Queens. A solitary and unathletic kid, he didn’t play baseball. “My sport was chess,” he said. But he listened to games on the tabletop radio in his living room, pulling in broadcasts from as far away as St. Louis and Chicago. “The whole league was available if you had a good radio.” By age nine, he was riding the subway on his own to go to afternoon games at one of New York’s three ballparks.
He credits his mother, a secretary for an insurance company, for his love of the game and for his appreciation of its history. The summer he turned ten, she took him to Boston to see a game at Braves Field before the team uprooted for Milwaukee.
That began a quest to visit all of the major-league ballparks. Since 1947, Hawkins has attended at least one regular-season game in every ballpark where M.L.B. has played, including novelty sites in Honolulu, San Juan, and Tokyo.
His pursuit to be present at every three-thousandth hit started with Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. When he realized that the two future Hall of Famers were on pace to reach the milestone during the same season, in 1970, Hawkins resolved to witness both events. “I thought, even if I do nothing else, this is going to give me something to talk about,” he said. “After that, I got infected with the three-thousand-hit bug, and decided to keep doing it.”
Hawkins is a collector by nature, and is especially fond of the late nineteenth century. He has filled his house, a two-story Victorian on a quiet side street in St. Paul, Minnesota, with porcelain figurines shelved in a corner, black-and-white postcards mounted on a stereoscope, antique furniture, period wallpaper, and Turkish rugs, transforming it into a private museum that he calls the Julian H. Sleeper House, after the original owner, who built it in 1884. Hawkins, twice divorced, lives there with three cats and a life-size mannequin of President James A. Garfield.
Seated in the parlor next to a stuffed owl atop a Wooton desk, wearing a gray sport coat, a blue shirt, and a necktie decorated with baseballs, Hawkins spoke in full, indulgent paragraphs. He is accustomed to captive audiences, having taught communications for thirty-five years, the bulk of them at Southern Connecticut State University. Occasionally, he refers to himself in the third person, as Dr. Fan, the nickname given to him in 1985 by Bob McCoy in his Sporting News column.
In addition to the three-thousand-hit games, Hawkins has witnessed some memorable bonus events: Mike Schmidt, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa reaching five hundred career home runs; Phil Niekro, Don Sutton, and Tom Glavine winning their three-hundredth games; and Pete Rose notching hit No. 4,000, to name a few. He had set out to see Niekro deliberately, but the others happened by chance while he was after another one of his other collectables. But early on he decided to collect three-thousand-hit milestones because they were predictable and infrequent enough to make advance travel arrangements possible. Hawkins has never owned a car or had a driver’s license, so he has had to find other modes of transportation, from friends with licenses to buses to planes and trains.
His strategy is to wait until a player gets within four or five hits and then start attending every game he plays until he reaches the milestone, which usually takes less than a week. Injuries can complicate plans, such as when George Brett, nearing the mark late in the 1992 season, sat out a couple of games nursing a sore shoulder. But Hawkins got a tip from someone he calls “an insider” that Brett was going to play in a road game against the Angels; he was able to get to Anaheim, where Brett had a four-hit day to reach the magic number.
The most serious threat to Hawkins’s streak came in the summer of 1999, when Tony Gwynn, of the San Diego Padres, and Wade Boggs, of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, closed in on their three-thousandth hits simultaneously. “I started having nightmares a year in advance that they would do it on the same night in different cities,” Hawkins said.
He scrutinized the box scores for both, watching their hit tallies rise, trying to predict when and where each player would reach his milestone. With Boggs at two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine on an off day in August, Hawkins saw Gwynn hit No. 2,999 in St. Louis then followed the Padres to Montreal. Hawkins got delayed at the airport and had to race to the ballpark. He bought a ticket on the street and had not been in his seat ten minutes before Gwynn got his big hit.
Lucky for Hawkins, Boggs went oh-for-three that same day. Hawkins headed back to the airport, found a flight from Montreal to Tampa Bay via Cincinnati—this was back when you could buy an open ticket—and managed to see Boggs reach three thousand the next night at Tropicana Field.
In the course of forty-five years and twenty players, he’s logged a lot of miles and spent at least six figures in his pursuit. “There were times I put up some large amounts on my Visa with expensive flights, but you do it because there’s no second chance,” he said.
Hawkins’s unique pursuit has not gone unnoticed. In 2002, the Baseball Reliquary, an organization that honors the game’s oddities and oddballs, bestowed him with its annual Hilda Award, named after Hilda Chester, famous for ringing her cowbell at Ebbets Field for thirty years. “Dr. Fan definitely comes out of that crazy and wacky tradition of fans who love the game and are obsessive about it,” Terry Cannon, Baseball Reliquary’s founder and keeper, said.
Hawkins calls the award, which he keeps in an upstairs bedroom stuffed with baseball memorabilia, his “greatest honor.”
He has been recognized in other ways, too. When Rod Carew reached his milestone, in Anaheim, Hawkins looked up to see himself pictured on the Jumbotron with a note about his accomplishment. (He had let the Angels management know that he would be there and what seat he was in.) Fans seated nearby started passing down their ticket stubs for Hawkins to autograph. “There were more than fifty for Dr. Fan to sign,” Hawkins said.
Carew’s is among his favorite milestone moments. Others include Gwynn, whose work ethic he admired; Craig Biggio, whom he found especially likable; and Cal Ripken, who reached three thousand at the Metrodome, a convenient eight-mile bus ride from Hawkins’s house.
Now he is after Alex Rodriguez. Hawkins regards his latest quarry with the same dispassionate interest as the previous twenty: despite having grown up in New York when the city hosted three ball clubs, he has never picked a favorite team to root for. “I’m as impartial as an umpire,” he declared. “Baseball is certainly a religion for Dr. Fan, but it’s not a religion where I worship a particular team.” So when A-Rod reaches his milestone, Dr. Fan will be there as usual, scorecard in hand, sporting “a tasteful baseball cap without a logo, to show my neutrality.”
Hawkins also remains neutral about Rodriguez’s recent suspension for performance-enhancing drugs. “It’s not my place for me to judge whether he’s tainted or not,” he said. “If Major League Baseball will accept his hits, I will, too. I will politely applaud him the way I have done the past twenty.”
Dr. Fan plans to continue his pursuit for as long as his health allows. This could include three-thousandth hits by Ichiro Suzuki, Adrián Beltré, and Albert Pujols over the next several years. Hawkins would especially like to see Ichiro, who has two thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight hits, make the three-thousand-hit club, perhaps sometime next season. “If he does it, he will instantly be Dr. Fan’s favorite,” Hawkins said. “As you can see, my mind is in the eighteen-eighties. Ichiro is a version of a nineteenth-century ballplayer come back to life. He’s an improved version of Wee Willie Keeler”—the most prolific hitter of that era. “He’s worth waiting for.”
